


Mouthwatering

by Neyiea



Series: Ravenous [1]
Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: But every five years a couple of clowns wake up to eat people, Eldritch Abominations, Gotham is the same, Horror Elements, M/M, Stephen King's IT References, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2020-12-17 18:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21058778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neyiea/pseuds/Neyiea
Summary: Every five years there's an increase in lawbreaking and disappearances, and it isn't just apathy towards Gotham's amount of crime that keeps the citizens from taking note of the repeating cycle.There are other things at work. Darker things.Things that, one way or another, gain an interest in Bruce Wayne beyond wondering what his fear and flesh would taste like.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something a bit spookier than my norm for October, and I've been on a bit of an IT kick recently, so here we are.

The first time that it happens, when he is old enough to conceivably remember it happening had other forces not been surreptitiously at work <s>when he is old enough that he could be considered a decent target</s>, he is seven.

He is seven, and he is sure that his heart is broken, because his parents had promised that when the circus came to Gotham they would all go together, and he has been looking forward to it for months.

He’s been sheltered from news reports regarding the increase in crime and about how people, especially children, are going missing, and he doesn’t question the city-wide curfew since it’s precisely the time when his mother likes to tuck him into bed and thus has no impact on him, but the broken promise makes his eyes sting and his breath hitch, even as his mother attempts to ease the emotional ache by petting his hair and gently wiping his wet cheeks.

“The city isn’t safe after dark right now, honey. We’ll go next year,” she vows.

But one broken promise can easily become two broken promises, and he doesn’t understand what she means by ‘isn’t safe’, and the disappointment of being denied what he wants—what he was guaranteed by his father months ago with the sacred act of the shaking of hands and by his mother with the equally sacred act of linking their pinkies together—drives him to his room. 

He curls up against the window, letting the cool glass soothe his hot cheek, and sobs until he doesn’t have any tears left to cry, until he’s so worn out from his own emotional outbreak that he feels like he’s on the verge of sleep.

And then he spots them.

A huge bundle of red balloons far past the pool and the manicured lawn, where the edge of the woods that surrounds part of the property lay.

He is seven, and though he is too young to question the why and the how and the who of such a curious manifestation with as much suspicion as it deserves, he is old enough that he’s begun to want to figure things out for himself.

Sneaking out of the house seems easy; his mother, father, and Alfred all intently focusing their attention on other things to respect the privacy that Bruce had wordlessly requested when he’d shut his bedroom door to them, even though each of the adults really wanted nothing more than to console him. 

He sneaks past the pool, around the garden, over the lawn.

And then he sees that there is something, a person, holding the balloons, and that makes him come to a quiet stop.

Investigating a bunch of strange balloons was one thing, but investigating a stranger is another. His mother, and father, and Alfred have all been very adamant lately that he not talk to strangers, or let them get too close.

The balloons shift in a sudden gust of wind, and Bruce sees that the person is—

<s>Not a person.</s>

—a clown. Or at least he must be, for his face is so pale and strangely marked, and the skin around his eyes unnaturally darkened, and his smile is extended at the corners in such a <s>menacing</s> jovial way that there is nothing that he could be, but a clown.

“Hello Brucie,” the clown greets, drawing the name out sweetly.

Bruce’s nose wrinkles. Tommy Elliot calls him that.

Bruce doesn’t like Tommy Elliot.

He’s so caught up in his juvenile distaste that he doesn’t think to question how the clown might know the unbearable nickname. 

“My name is Bruce,” he says in response to it, lips pursing into a frown, eyes narrowing up at the clown who seems like he’s tall enough to tower over anyone he meets. Perhaps he’s even taller than Alfred, or his father. “Who are you?”

“My name,” he drawls, and his eyes seem to flash for a moment to a vivid, unsettling green, “is Jerome, and I’ve come to take you to the circus.”

Bruce’s heart twinges with fervent longing, but—

“My parents told me not to talk to strangers.” He folds his hands in front of himself and tries not to think about how much he’d been looking forward to the one thing that, it seemed, he was destined not to have. “I’m not supposed to go anywhere with them, either.”

Jerome crouches down on one knee. He seems much closer than he had been before.

Bruce pauses. Then realizes that he’d been walking forward without being aware of it. 

Strange. 

“But we’re not strangers, Brucie,” Jerome insists in a tone sweet enough that Bruce feels like he’s listening to the way honey would sound, if it could talk. “Strangers don’t know each other’s names.”

“Bruce,” he repeats stubbornly. “My name is Bruce.”

“Bruce,” Jerome echoes, grin stretching wider. “You’ve been looking forward to the circus for months, do you know how I know?”

Bruce shakes his head.

Jerome’s lower lip shines in the light of dusk, as if he’s wearing lip gloss.

<s>As if he’s started drooling.</s>

“I know because I’m a magic clown,” he states with a laugh, “and I can take you to the circus and get you back here before anyone even realizes that you’re missing. What do you say, huh? There are acrobats, and sword swallowers, and a bunch of fun games to play. There’s popcorn, and candy floss, and so many other delicious snacks,” Jerome purrs.

And Bruce wants to go, really, but—

“I’m sorry,” he tells the clown with the grave air of a child who has never outright disobeyed their parents and wasn’t planning to any time soon, circus or not. “But I can’t.”

The clown’s smile fades and the glinting light in his eyes that had shone like it was laughter disappears. Bruce feels guilty knowing that the clown had come all this way, just for him, for nothing.

“I can’t change your mind?”

Bruce shakes his head and offers a sincere, “I’m sorry.”

“How about I give you a balloon, then?”

Bruce isn’t supposed to take things from strangers, either, but…

Surely a balloon couldn’t hurt?

“All right, thank you,” he stretches out a hand, and the clown separates one of the balloons from the bunch. His smile is steadily returning, in fact it almost seems to be wider than before.

He must be a very kind clown, Bruce thinks to himself, to be so happy about giving away his balloons. 

Their fingers brush, and Bruce’s hand jerks back.

Cold.

Jerome’s hand was so cold.

There is a flickering of fear because Bruce, even at seven, recognizes that there is something wrong about the temperature. His eyes dart up to Jerome’s growing smile—made even more apparent by the prominent glimmering of his lower lip—and his glinting eyes, and he forgets about the balloon.

He reaches forward with both hands to cradle Jerome’s in his own.

“Your hand is freezing,” he says, rubbing it between his much warmer palms and fingers. His mother had done the same for him when they had spent the winter holiday in Switzerland last year and Bruce had stayed outside to build a snowman for long enough that all of the heat had leeched out of his body. His initial fear melts away as he focuses on the task of bringing heat back into the limb. “Are you always this cold? You should wear gloves. I could get a pair for you, if you like.” He glances up and sees Jerome watching him with something curious and contemplative on his features. “It’ll be a gift,” Bruce explains. “A thank you, for the balloon.” 

Jerome’s hand is still much too cold so Bruce brings it up to his mouth to blow warm air across his knuckles. In another mimic of what his mother had done for him—and knowing that it had made him feel warm and safe and loved and all that is good—he presses a quick kiss to the back of Jerome’s hand.

The coolness of him lingers on Bruce’s lips even after he pulls back.

“Does that feel any better,” he asks, not afraid but certainly worried. Surely it wasn’t healthy for a person to be so cold. To stay so cold.

“What a sweet little morsel you are,” Jerome says instead of answering Bruce’s question. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply—for a brief moment Bruce thinks that this has been the first time that his eyes have fallen shut and that he hasn’t actually blinked all throughout their interaction, but that didn’t make any sort of sense outside of a staring contest—and his fingers curl tightly around Bruce’s own, almost as if he means to tug Bruce forward.

But someone calls Bruce’s name, and he draws his hand out of Bruce’s grasp.

Bruce frowns at him, not understanding the quick retreat, but—

“Bruce!”

Alfred is calling for him, and he sounds so panicked that Bruce cannot _not_ turn around and respond to him. 

And when he turns back around Jerome is gone, and his balloons are floating away.

He watches them drift further until Alfred finds him, running towards him and pulling him into his arms as if he thought that he would never see Bruce again.

“Why did you come out here alone? We’ve been so worried,” Alfred says, nearly breathless with exertion. 

“There was a clown,” Bruce responds simply. “He offered me a balloon, but they’re all floating away now. See?” He points up, and Alfred follows the direction that he indicants.

But his eyebrows furrow, as if he thinks Bruce is telling a fib.

As if he can’t see them.

The very next day Bruce is on a plane bound for Switzerland where he explores different woods, learns French, and leads the happy, carefree existence of a boy who is loved and doted on so completely by his family. 

And he quickly forgets about the circus, and the balloons, and the clown.

Much later he will learn that the clown never forgot about him.


	2. Chapter 2

The next time it happens he is twelve years old and, though he does not know it yet, he is on the brink of the most devastating night of his young life. There is no curfew and no one has been reported missing.

The first ones to disappear are always the sort that nobody thinks or bothers to search for. 

Bruce is happy because, even if school can sometimes be unbearable and he doesn’t quite seem to fit in with his peers, tonight he and his parents are going to go see a movie that Bruce has been wanting to see for what feels like forever.

He regularly spends his lunch at the city library instead of the school’s—because it is far less likely that Tommy Elliot and his gang of ruffian friends will seek him out off of school property—so that is where he finds himself today, lured to the wide selection of mystery novels. He takes a few and skims over the backs as he walks to the tables, and thus doesn’t see the tall man in front of him staring off <s>at a frightened looking teenager</s> into space until they’ve already collided.

Bruce drops his novels, and the man lets out a displeased hiss as his concentration breaks.

“I’m so sorry,” Bruce apologizes, dropping down to gather his books and then, seeing that the man had dropped a few of his own as well as several sheets of paper, he takes those into his hands too. “It’s my fault, I—” He glimpses up and the words catch in his throat.

For a second, just a second, he thinks that the man has such an unnaturally white face and painted eyes and lips that are so red that he must be—

<s>a clown</s>

—fearless about the reaction most people in Gotham would have to a man wearing such obvious makeup, but no, he just an ordinary man with skin that is pale but not a ghastly white, eyes that are striking but not enhanced with cosmetics, and lips that are deep pink but not the glistening red of fresh blood. 

His eyes seem to flicker a vibrant, acidic green in irritation before his gaze actually falls on Bruce. Then his face smooths out, any lingering anger abruptly disappearing.

A strange trick of the library light. Bruce has never seen eyes turn that colour before.

Or… Has he? 

“I’m sorry,” Bruce offers again, his mind trying to tug at a memory that won’t come forward from the shadows that had overtaken it five years ago. “Do I—” He pauses, licks his lips. His heart is thundering in his chest and he can feel his palms begin to go clammy, but he’s not sure why. “Do I know you?”

“No,” the man replies, his voice is deep and melodic. Almost unnaturally soothing, as if he spends his time luring people into a false sense of security. Which is a very unkind thing to think about a stranger, so Bruce abruptly forces the thought out of his head. “I would remember meeting someone like you.”

That’s a rather strange thing for a normal adult to say to a child, Bruce realizes in the far corners of his mind, but he’s too caught up trying to chase the source of his eerie feeling of déjà vu. 

“Perhaps you’ve seen my brother,” the man says, though with a curious inflection to his tone as if not many people could claim to have seen his brother. His eyes become more intent, unblinking and almost piercing, as if Bruce is a puzzle that he’d like very much to figure out. “We’re twins, so people get us confused all the time,” he offers in explanation.

“That must be it.”

It must be, right? 

Bruce looks down at the books and papers he’s collected, embarrassed at his inability to recall why he feels as though he should recognize this stranger, and his eyes catch on a schematic of some kind.

“Did you draw this?” He looks it over carefully, appreciating the detail in the linework. Getting lost in the elegant strokes of graphite is much easier than trying to remember something that wants to stay forgotten. “It’s beautiful.”

The man doesn’t respond until Bruce’s eyes dart up to his face. He looks satisfied—as if he’s not used to compliments—but smug—as if he knows he deserves them. 

“Thank you.” He lifts up a hand to adjust his glasses. The action almost fully conceals the way that he inhales deeply, as though he’s just caught a whiff of a pleasing scent. “I’m currently fortifying the supports in a tunnel, which may well collapse if the job isn’t done correctly because _someone_ dug it out without properly planning it first, but with any luck these reinforcements will stand the pressure for hundreds of years to come.”

Bruce wonders if he’s talking about one of the subway tunnels.

He certainly hopes that none of them will collapse. 

“If they function as nicely as they look then I’m positive that they’ll withstand the tests of time,” he says with utter sincerity. “Here.” Bruce holds the books and papers that the man had dropped out to him, and he smiles as he reaches over take them. Their fingers brush.

His hands are cold.

It briefly strikes Bruce as odd, considering the balmy warmth of the day, but he is too polite to mention it.

<s>And too old, now, to take the hand of a stranger between his own to try and rub heat into it.</s>

“I’m sorry again for running into you, sir,” is what comes out of his mouth instead, and the man’s lips twitch as if he’s fighting an amused smile.

“Jeremiah,” he states, unable to hold back—not a laugh, but a giggle. “My name is Jeremiah, not ‘sir’.”

“I’m Bruce,” he responds, because the manners that have been ingrained in him demand that he give his own name when someone introduces themselves. 

“Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime, Bruce,” Jeremiah tells him, his eyes drifting half-shut as his smile widens further. There’s something very <s>unsettling, hungry</s> familiar about his smile.

The hair on the back of Bruce’s neck stands up.

“Maybe,” he says, his voice more hesitant than usual. He suddenly feels a distinct urge to <s>run</s> set off, because if he stays in the library for much longer he won’t make it back on time for his next class. “Have a nice day.”

“You as well, Bruce,” Jeremiah whispers under his breath as Bruce leaves. He watches Bruce’s retreating back until he’s completely out of sight and then his attention turns, not to the books or papers in his hands, but to the frightened looking teenager seated only a few meters away. 

No one notices.

Memories of Jeremiah and the strangeness of their meeting are cast aside by the end of the night as Bruce, terrified and devastated beyond measure, screams and sobs with his parents’ blood on his hands.

He doesn’t see the pair of inhuman eyes that seem to watch him from the sewer grate.

He doesn’t see the matching set that joins them.

In the early weeks, when he wakes up from night terrors with tears running down his faces, sometimes he is certain that he is being watched. That there is someone—or something, or even more than _one_ something—lurking in the dark corners of his room. When he flicks on the light there is no one there. No burglar in the shadows. No murderer with a gun.

No strange man with strange eyes from a mostly-forgotten nightmare of his childhood. 

He sleeps with his desk light on, anyway, at least until he decides that he wants to conquer his fears.

Fear of the dark, of heights, of drowning, of pain, of <s>clowns with wide smiles and glinting eyes</s> masked strangers in alleys. He faces them one by one, and if he sometimes feels as though he is being watched, even when he is obviously alone, he chalks it up to the ever-present worry that Alfred will find him and disapprove. 

And he never notices—just as no one ever notices when the pair wish to keep themselves concealed during their stalking—that sometimes when he is in the city beings with eyes that shine an eerie green will observe him, and sometimes follow him, from a distance. 

A distance that, as time goes on, closes imperceptibly.

Step by step by step.

On occasion Bruce feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up and he swirls around to find that there is no one standing behind him, and that’s just another thing that the pair chuckle to each other about while out of sight.

Those that they stalk aren’t usually so perceptive. Or interesting.

Or entertaining to watch. 

They have a twisted fondness, or something like it, for the boy who is trying to conquer fear. His horror on the night his parents had died had been sublime even from a distance, his nightmares had been a delicacy that they had savored, and they have enjoyed toying with him at times when he is scared and believes himself to be alone, but there is something about him that does not read as prey. 

He’s something more.

Something better. 

So, though it would be as easy as it always is, they do not take. They watch, and they listen, and they occasionally get close enough to breathe in the scent of him, or playfully skim the sharp tips of their claws through the soft ends of his curls.

And they wonder what they should do if someday he turns around fast enough that he catches sight of them, or wakes up and sees them grinning down at them.

“Do you think he would scream?” One asks the other.

“No, not anymore.” The other says. “I think he would kick and punch, scratch and bite.”

They both laugh, their bared teeth glinting like knives in the dark.

“If he managed to draw our blood with his blunt human nails and teeth then I think he would deserve to be bitten back, don’t you?”

“Maybe he’d like it, if we do it softly.”

There is a long, considering pause.

There is an unusual heat sparking in the ravenous void inside of them.

“Maybe he would.”

But they cannot spend all of their time on amusing games. They must hunt and feast too, because the time to sleep again draws ever nearer. 

Months pass.

As Bruce’s terror diminishes his anger grows. 

He needs to know who did it. Why they did it. He needs answers, and if he cannot trust adults to unearth those answers for him then he will find them himself.

It’s the rising stress caused by his own expectations, he thinks, that makes him sporadically jolt awake at night. 

It’s only stress, he reminds himself firmly when he stares into the shadows in the corners of the room as if he expects to find eyes staring back at him. His hands curl into tight fists and his lips press together into a thin frown, but nothing steps out of the shadows. Not even when he pointedly states under his breath that it’s cowardly to hide in the dark.

He becomes caught up in the perpetual task of solving his parents’ murder, but that doesn’t mean that he is blind to the spike in crimes and disappearances that are currently happening in his city. He is old enough and has enough first-hand experience to know that Gotham is far from the nicest place on Earth, but he’s also old enough to question why there isn’t more being done.

Old enough to question why the police, and the politicians, and the news anchors seem to be so apathetic about everything. Old enough to speculate on why it is that everyone with the power to be able to do some good for Gotham is too jaded or self-important to lift a single finger. 

More should be done. More needs to be done.

He just needs to solve his parents’ murder and get the closure that he is so desperate for first, and then…

He’ll focus his attention on Gotham’s other crimes. 

One such a crime is the mysterious disappearance of the newly arrived Theo Galavan. 

What Bruce doesn’t know—what no one knows—is that Theo died slow and screaming, horrified beyond his wits for hours, until there was not enough left of him that anyone would be able to identify the man who had spoken so freely about his plans for Bruce Wayne when he thought that no one but his sister could hear him. 

Bruce turns thirteen and he’s searching for even more answers, now, because his father was a man who had secrets, and maybe it is those secrets that got himself and his wife killed. 

The year ends, the unusual amount of crime sprees gives way to the usual—

Bruce has a strange dream; voices bidding him goodnight, a cool touch of something against his forehead, wide smiles on shadowy faces that showcased far too many teeth.

—and the staggering number of missing people—especially children—peters out, but Bruce remembers the intense apathy of the adults who should have done more to help keep the city safe, and that is a mystery that he wants to solve, as well.

“Every five years,” he’ll say to Alfred once he’s completed enough research and has triple checked his newspaper clippings and numbers to be certain that he isn’t wrong. “The increase in crime and disappearances, it happens every five years.”

He needs to know who. He needs to know why.

But Gotham citizens are prone to forgetfulness and people who leave, even for a short while, are even more susceptible. 

Gotham isn’t safe. Alfred takes him away on ‘a much-needed holiday’.

Bruce remembers that his city is full of crime and criminals but the cycle begins to slip out of his mind, though not as readily as the memories of the clown from his childhood. The pattern lingers like a residue in the back of his head, waiting for a reason to be remembered.

Waiting for the next wave. 

When he steps on Gotham soil again he doesn’t think about the five-year surges at all because it’s very clear to him that ever since his parents’ deaths the city has been going through a downward spiral.

Bruce wonders if he’ll be able to save it before they all crash and burn.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so happy to hear that you guys are enjoying this so far! I had a lot of fun with this chapter, like, I'm honestly thinking about doing a little one-shot spin-off because it would have been so easy to just up the rating of this fic so that I could write _more_, y'know? So, that might happen once this is actually done because I cannot help myself, haha.
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> xoxo

They wake up ravenous, as they always do, but they can’t snatch half a dozen humans from the street in the span of a few days no matter how quickly it would sate their gnawing appetite. Even in Gotham—a place full of so much corruption and chaos and criminals—such a spree would be surely noticed.

So they start slow, drawing out the fear of their prey with the same wicked delight as always, but they also keep an eye out for the one who has become too dear to their monstrous hearts to hunt and devour.

They’d missed him as they dreamt. 

He’s started taking to the streets with his face concealed by a mask, intervening in crime and bruising his knuckles on the breaking bodies of those that he targets. There’s a grace to his movements that screams of discipline and training that they must have missed out on during their sleep, but they both find it amusing to observe his handiwork whenever they can. 

Amusing, and something _else._

Something cloyingly warm that leaves them wanting even after they’ve had their fill of fear and flesh from the ones their boy had fearlessly stood against and left on the cement without bothering to call the police. Occasionally someone manages to land a lucky hit and they can smell his blood in the air, and it makes them salivate out of a desire to lap it softly from his broken skin as opposed to ripping him apart and drinking the warm red from his veins, as they would do with any other. 

They soon learn of a new, strange policy in the city; men and women with little paper cards seem to be capable of getting away with just about anything. It’s almost hilarious, how easy the new system makes it for them to hunt. Disappearances can be explained away more casually than ever, because who wouldn’t run away from a city where crime is being legalized, and even months after they’ve awoken no one has proposed a city-wide curfew.

They’ve never needed permission to take as they please and their focus remains on the younger humans whose fears are much more tangible and exploitable and delicious, but they figure that it’s almost like they’re doing their mad city a favour by slaughtering whatever card-holders that are unlucky enough to cross their paths as they hunt.

They wonder if Bruce would appreciate the way they efficiently tear the criminals apart after they’ve successfully flashed their paper to get away with whatever offense suited them best.

They chortle at the thought of it.

But something happens when they aren’t looking, and something about their boy changes.

He goes out to the sort of establishment that he’s never gone to before, one that reeks of alcohol and sweat and pheromones, and it is there that they see him lean in towards some human girl—someone who should be too soft and weak and ordinary to capture the attention of a boy that is so very perceptive and so very interesting—and press his lips to hers in a tediously passionate display that they have seen other humans do too many times to count.

Something flares inside of them, an emotion usually only felt when one cuts in on the fun of the other’s hunt or steals their prey right before they pounce. 

Jealousy.

And seeing how close they can sneak up to him—how much they can touch him—without alerting him to their presence or watching him as he dances with lesser beings that don’t deserve his attention is far from being enough.

It never would have been enough.

x-x-x

Bruce is seventeen, and he owns a club, and he drinks enough that he can momentarily forget how much he’s started to hate himself. 

He hasn’t been the same since he killed Ra’s. He’s a murderer. A criminal. For the first time in a long time all he wants is to be like a normal teenager, even if he has to pretend.

So he drinks, and he dances, and he loses himself. He’s not sure that he wants to be found.

They find him anyway.

It is not the first time that other guys have approached him on the dance floor, although these two don’t so much ‘approach’ as they do ‘suddenly trespass upon his personal space’. There is a chest against his back and breath on his neck from one side, and hands on his hips from the other. If Bruce hadn’t already had a few shots he might have lashed out at the rapidity that he’s surrounded, effectively caged between two bodies larger than his own.

There is a brief flicker of fear—the man behind him hums under his breath in a pleased way and shifts even closer—before he remembers that he is capable enough to take down a few untrained men, even if he’s not sober. They’re nothing that he has to worry about.

He twists so that he can take in their faces. Standing between them as he is he can’t really focus on them both at the same time, so his eyes drift between to two as he comes to the realization that their similarities aren’t just a trick of the shadows.

They must be twins. 

He means to ask, ‘who are you?’, but he’s tipsy, and their eyes flash so strangely in the lights, and sometimes out of the corner of his eyes their smiles appear too wide, and their teeth too sharp, and their faces fundamentally _not-right_ in a way that he wouldn’t be able to express with words, so what he asks instead is, “What are you?” 

There’s a pause.

Then one of them, the one who had been behind him, chuckles deeply. Bruce almost thinks he can feel it reverberating in his bones.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, darlin’,” he purrs, and Bruce feels his cheeks go inexplicably hot. “The answers to those kinds of questions might just fracture your precious, sharp mind, and we haven’t even gotten to properly play with you yet. Just call me Jerome.”

“Ignore him, he’s been drinking on an empty stomach,” the other cuts in sharply, turning his gaze away from Bruce and towards his twin to pin him with a pointed glare. “He didn’t think to eat before he came here, the fool.” He holds the look for a long moment before his eyes intently retrace the path to Bruce’s face, his features quickly slipping from angry to innocuous. “I’m Jeremiah, by the way,” he adds, voice going soft but somehow still managing to be heard over the music, as if Bruce’s ears are so attuned to the sound of it that everything else is faded in comparison. 

Their eyes glint in the flashing lights again, an oddly eerie green that is perplexingly familiar.

“Do I know you?” He must have seen them before. Something locked away inside of himself recognizes them, that’s the only explanation for why these two elicit such a response in him—his heartbeat increasing, his palms going clammy, goosebumps spreading over his arms—when none of the other strangers he’s danced with has caused anything of the sort. “I feel as though we’ve met.”

Perhaps a long time ago. Perhaps in a half-forgotten dream. 

Jeremiah’s chest puffs out, as if he’s pleased. Jerome chuckles again. 

He knows them. He must know them. They’re happy that he remembers them.

“We’ve been in Gotham for a long time,” Jeremiah says, a smirk tugging at his lips as if he’s said something funny. 

“We might have crossed paths once or twice,” Jerome adds. He’s leaned in so close that as he breathes the words into Bruce’s ear Bruce can feel the rush of his hot breath against the side of his face and his neck, and it makes him shudder. 

“I’m sorry that I don’t remember,” Bruce offers, feeling oddly sincere about the sentiment. He feels as though he should remember, as if he’s missing out on something important by forgetting. A gloved hand skims over his shoulder, up his neck, cups his cheek.

“It’s alright,” Jeremiah assures him kindly, “you can’t help it.”

What a strange thing to say.

But Bruce has heard stranger things, and he doesn’t want to be rude, so he lets the comment that is building up on his tongue dissipate into nothingness. 

They dance.

It’s different from any dance Bruce has shared before. One, if not both, of the brothers is always touching him in some way. A hand on his cheek, on his shoulder, on his hip, a finger trailing down his sternum, across his lips, a chest at his back.

A thigh between his legs.

He’s not sure who initiates the kiss, he’s not even sure which twin he’s kissing, all he knows is that their lips are strangely cool and that its much wetter than any kiss he’s ever experienced. Before he can even figure out whether he likes it or is sickened by it he’s pulled into another equally wet, oddly hungry kiss. He’s herded back towards the small seating area that lines the dance floor, opposite to the bar where he thinks his friends are still drinking.

He’s sandwiched between them in a booth before he can think to protest. Then they start paying him even more attention, and he’s not entirely sure that he wants to protest.

Jerome is the one kissing him now, though he’s mostly dragging his teeth against Bruce’s lips in a way that makes something hot and curious inside him spark, with one hand digging possessively into Bruce’s curls. Jeremiah, apparently not interested in waiting for his own turn, fits himself tightly against Bruce’s side and lays a playful hand on Bruce’s knee, firmly dragging it up his thigh until it’s skirting dangerously close to where his heated blood is pooling. 

Bruce gasps. Jerome chuckles darkly and takes Bruce’s lower lip between his teeth and bites just a little too hard which makes Bruce’s heart flutter in a strange mix of anxiety and arousal, then he deepens their kiss into something that Bruce can’t help but think is indecent—surrounded by people as they are—just like this entire situation is turning out to be. Jeremiah laughs and murmurs something under his breath that Bruce can’t quite make out but sounds very satisfied, and he presses a sweet kiss to Bruce’s clothed shoulder, then to the bare crook of his neck, then against the bounding pulse in his throat as he presses the palm of his hand down on Bruce—

“Someone’s going to see,” Bruce whispers harshly against Jerome’s mouth, fighting the urge to shift lewdly against Jeremiah’s hand. “We shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t isn’t the same as can’t,” Jerome tells him with a smirk, licking his lips. His mouth seems wider than before, seems scarred—

“No one’s paying us any attention, sweetheart,” Jeremiah coos into his ear, giving the cartilage a mischievous nip before he continues. The sharp prick of his teeth makes Bruce jolt. “We want to make you feel good. Isn’t that what you want?” Bruce glances over at him and squints as he tries to figure out why his eyes are making him see thing that he knows can’t be true—Jerome’s extensive scars and Jeremiah’s ghostly face and vivid red lips. 

He shuts his eyes tightly.

“I think what you really want is to eat me alive,” slips out of his mouth, instinctive. “You both seem ravenous when you look at me.”

They both laugh. It’s eerie, how similar they look but how differently they laugh. 

His eyes flutter open, and their faces appear as they ought to—appear human—again. 

“No, no, the time for eating is over,” Jerome says, though he doesn’t sound very reassuring. “You’re too good to gobble up in one bite. You’re a sweet morsel that’s meant to be savored.” 

“What he means to say is that we’re really enjoying our time with you, Bruce.” Jeremiah cuts in, soothing the unease left by Jerome’s strange words. “Aren’t you enjoying it too?”

“Yes.”

But.

“Then stay with us.”

“You won’t regret it.”

He feels calmer, and his eyelids are growing heavy, and the sudden desire to give in to what they want blooms inside of him, because Bruce wants it too. He wants to feel good in a way that he’s never let himself before, and there really doesn’t seem to be anyone paying them any attention. Jerome and Jeremiah could do so many things to him and no one would even notice—

But then from across the room he catches sight of Grace just as her eyes lock on him. He’s too far away to hear her call his name, but he can read her lips well enough even in the dim light. 

The spell seems to break.

“I need to go,” he says. “Sorry, I’m sorry, but my friend is looking for me.” He turns to leave, and for a long moment it seems as though Jeremiah has no intent to move aside to let him pass freely, as if he thinks he can pin Bruce in place without a fight, but he finally relents.

“Maybe some other time then, Brucie,” Jerome calls after him, and Bruce feels his lips twist at the nickname. 

He turns abruptly.

“My name is Bruce.”

A wave of familiarity crashes over him so hard he feels almost dizzy. He closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths, trying to keep himself steady even though he feels as though the floor is collapsing under him.

They knew his name. He hadn’t introduced himself to them tonight. They’d been almost purposefully vague about whether or not they’d properly met him before, but they must have, must have, must have—

By the time Bruce opens his eyes they’ve both disappeared from the booth, and when he looks around for them he can’t find them anywhere in the crowd. He startles at the feeling of Grace’s hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, easy Bruce, it’s just me.” She smiles at him, soft and sweet, with her very straight, very blunt teeth.

And that was a weird thing to think about a person, wasn’t it? The bluntness of their teeth? Surely that was the norm and anything else was an outlier that should be paid attention to.

Bruce’s bottom lip is sore. He wonders if Jerome broke skin when he bit. 

“Who were those guys you were with?”

Bruce casts a glance behind him at the empty booth. He tries to think of any moment in his life where he might have met either of them, but all he comes up with are loose ends.

“I don’t know,” he tells her. 

Ravenous men, is what he thinks. He still feels hot where they touched him, as if the contact had branded him. He thinks that it wouldn’t take much for him to fall under their thrall again, wouldn’t take much for him to give in to what they wanted, if he ran into them again.

If Grace hadn’t been looking for him, how far would he have let them take it?

He’s not sure, and the fact that he doesn’t know unnerves him.

He turns to Grace again, reaching out and taking her hands in his own. Her smile fades as she takes in the look on his face.

“Grace, could you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” she replies stiltedly, clearly taken aback by his shift in mood. The last time they’d seen each other, before Bruce had thrown himself onto the dance floor, Bruce had been all smiles and laughter. “What is it?”

“When we’re out, will you make sure that I don’t go too crazy? I just—it’s one thing to have fun with friends, but it’s another to go off with men you don’t even know.” He bites the inside of his cheek, embarrassed, and he casts another glance at the empty booth. They’d moved so fast. Normal people couldn’t move so fast. “Right?”

Where had he met them before?

Grace’s face smooths out into an expression of heartfelt understanding. 

“Of course,” she says, and relief washes over Bruce like a tide. “Of course, I’ll look out for you.”

“Thank you.”

Weeks blur together, nights filled with drinking and dancing and people who he’ll never remember the names of spilling into each other indistinctly. Occasionally he’ll catch sight of vivid green eyes in the crowd and his heart will jump, but he doesn’t see their familiar faces.

And he doesn’t know that they can approach with _unfamiliar faces._

Bruce—out of a mixture of paranoia and instinct—feels as though they might be watching, though.

He still cannot recall meeting them; but the worry that grips at him and the idea that he should remember, that it’s important that he remember, fades with time. 

His cheek is bruised and sore. Alfred is gone

He really doesn’t have any family left, now.

Grace had been anxious at the sight of his face when they’d met up tonight, running a soft hand over his discoloured skin and exclaiming her affront while Tommy snorted at her concern. 

Bruce had imagined that he’d heard displeased hissing.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he’d said, truthfully enough, and Grace had eventually let the matter drop.

They’d started their evening in one club that they’d only managed to enter on account of Bruce’s last name, but the music had been quieter, the crowd older and less unruly, and Bruce had grown tired of it after an hour. They’d set out onto the street to find themselves a different haunt for the night, and Bruce had heard something.

A scream.

And even if his days of walking on rooftops and fighting crime were over, he found he couldn’t ignore it.

He’d broken off into a run, Tommy and Grace calling after him in shock as if they hadn’t heard what Bruce had. He’d sprinted blindly through a maze of dark alleys, thinking distantly that it was odd for the city to have so many terrible blind spots where awful things could easily happen.

Bruce eventually slows to a stop, taking deep breaths of cool air into his lungs and straining his ears for any more calls of distress.

He doesn’t hear anything. Nothing.

Not even the sound of traffic.

The hair on the back of his neck stands up.

“Who’s there?”

The regular sounds of the city enfold him in a rush, is if he’d made his way into an insulated bubble that had popped once the vibrations of his own voice reached its borders. The abrupt wall of noise washing over him is even eerier than the silence had been, and his skin prickles uncomfortably as the unmistakable sensation of being watched washes over him.

He licks his lips before calling out, voice rough with defensiveness, hands curling into loose fists as his feet spread wider to ready himself for an attack.

“I know someone’s there, come out.”

The muffled sound of traffic and the distant calls of his name from Grace and Tommy are all the he hears for a long stretch, but then he is sure, absolutely certain, that he hears a laugh.

Or maybe not just one laugh. Maybe two very different laughs combining into one ominous sound.

He casts a quick glance around, but there’s no one around him.

<s>No one above street level, anyways.</s>

After another tense minute Grace and Tommy manage to find him and drag him to the main road, Grace curiously asking what made him dart off in the first place.

“I thought I heard someone scream. I didn’t find them, though.”

<s>No one would.</s>

“Maybe I was just hearing things,” he offers, though his heart isn’t behind the sentiment.

That night he dreams of cool hands on his bruised cheek and petting his hair, and incomprehensible words being whispered in his ear. Rather than soothing him it makes him feel on edge, and upon awakening he drags himself through his too big, too quiet, too empty home to look for any signs that he’d had a break in.

He finds nothing, but that does little to make him feel better.

He wonders what’s so important about the two who he can’t even recall properly meeting that they’ve started invading his dreams, as if his mind is desperately trying to latch on to them.

Desperately trying not to forget them, again.

But that’s just another problem he doesn’t want to deal with, and his time pretending to be something akin to a normal teenager with normal vices eventually comes to an abrupt end curtesy of Ivy Pepper. 

And then he has to try and get Alfred back. 

And then Ra’s al Ghul comes back from the dead.

And although his mind seems intent on retaining names and faces that he doesn’t have time for—tricking him into seeing the green flash of their eyes when he is very much alone, hearing their voices in his waking moments just as much as when he sleeps, seeing their faces <s>and not their faces, faces with too-wide smiles and too-sharp teeth, so menacing that it’s almost trivializing to think of them as clowns</s> in his dreams—he can only focus on so many things at once, and the man who still calls him his heir is a much bigger problem than two men who aren’t normal in a city full of people who aren’t normal. 

Or at least that’s what he believes.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry 'bout the wait, but here we go again. :)

During their extensive existence they have felt desire—for fear and flesh and blood and the opportunity to play cruelly with their prey—but those habitual cravings had been boring when compared to the new and delightful sensations of touching soft skin with the intent to entice, tasting willingly parted lips, causing a human heart to beat loud and fast for reasons that had nothing to do with fear, and watching pupils dilate and cheeks flush.

Their sleep had been restless and had almost broken far more times than any other cycle before. They’d drifted close to wakefulness in an unconscious impulse to take take take what they craved, a newly-familiar heat flickering inside the depths of them.

When they do finally wake up again it is in unison and with a snap of sudden awareness.

They are once again free to do as they wish. They are free to seek him out. 

They are hungry, always so hungry after their years-long fast, but it is not the usual plans to find dismissible prey that whets their appetite as they slink through their extensive network of subterranean passages that eventually attach to Gotham’s sewer system.

Jeremiah’s tunnel under the river is one of his greatest projects to date and had come in handy so many times over the years as they watched their boy grow up. They easily slink though the reinforced passageway to the offshoot of tunnels that Jerome had discovered many cycles ago—even before the evening where a child who should have screamed and tried to flee before being snatched up by ravenous teeth had been so syrupy sweet that Jerome, unaccustomed to and bemused by the warm and gentle touch of small hands, had idly wondered if digging his teeth into Bruce’s soft flesh would be more like biting into a caramel than seasoned meat. 

The sky is tinged with oranges and pinks in the east when they slip onto the grounds, into the manor, through the shadows and up the stairs. As always, they pass by unnoticed, and something like exhilaration builds up underneath their skin as they finally enter—

His room—where they watched him have nightmares as a child, where they’d threaded their clawed fingers through his soft hair and whispered terrible promises of what was to come, where they’d curiously brushed their cool lips against his warm cheeks and forehead in order the gauge the sensation of flesh pressing against their mouths without the purpose of being eaten—is well cared for but appears unlived in, too immaculately tidy for even Bruce. The sheets are freshly laundered and there’s no dust marring the surface of mirrors or furniture, but the scent and sensation of Bruce’s presence has faded.

There is no trace of it left in the city.

They want him.

But they cannot find him, not even after spending an entire day aboveground searching relentlessly. 

On this ball of dirt which lazily circles a star they are something like Gods, but even they have limits. They cannot flicker in and out of existence across the entire planet in order to seek him out. They cannot put a pause on the breaking of their fast for an indeterminable amount of time. 

Bruce is not dead. They can _feel_ it. They know it just as confidently as they know their own nature, but he is far away from home. There is a link, stretched to the point of breaking, which connects them. A link that should not have grown so weak during the time that they’d spent sleeping.

They wrap their consciousnesses around it as if they mean to reel him back to where he belongs. Back to them. They close their eyes and call out to him with enough force that the foundations of Gotham rumble and lights all throughout the city flicker before going out.

The surge of fear—from children afraid of the dark to adults afraid of what could have caused an outage during such a clear, still night—feeds into their efforts. 

They call him back home.

x-x-x

Bruce has been out of Gotham for a few years training to become the exact type of person that his city needs; someone who can stand up to fear and protect his people. Every day he tests his body, mind, and endurance. Every day he pushes himself just a little bit closer to his ultimate goal. He still has years ahead of him before he’s ready to go back, but his plan is too important to risk starting early and getting killed or unmasked.

He’s in the middle of a set of breathing exercises when a sudden wave of homesickness crashes over him, nearly overwhelming in its intensity. After the first few months away from home he had thought he’d gotten over the worst of it but this sudden, potent longing is so extreme that he thinks if he’d been standing he would have fallen to his knees at the severity of it.

Bruce doesn’t think he has ever _felt_ this intensely before.

Bruce doesn’t think that the _longing_ is originating solely from his own desire to set foot on the soil of his island again. 

He feels as if he’s being summoned back.

But who—what?—cared enough about his departure to command him home abruptly after years of being away?

In the back of his mind he knows that half a world away the sun has set. 

In the very darkest corner of his mind he thinks that something that thrives in the shadows has woken up.

He tries to focus his attention back on his breathing, but the almost-constricting feeling in his chest—as if as set of arms has wrapped tightly around him, as if they are trying to pull him away—makes each breath quicker and shallower than the one before it.

There’s something deeply unnatural about this. He’s seen enough from his travels, and from even before he’d left Gotham behind, to know that there are strange and almost inexplicable things in the world.

He steels himself, rolls his shoulders back, shuts his eyes. He focuses on the compression that is making it difficult to draw in air, homing in on the link—

“Stop,” he commands sharply.

The word seems to reverberate in the near-empty room around him, bouncing off the walls and echoing back to his own ears, traveling across an incorporeal thread to a connection half a world away.

For a few seconds the tightness intensifies to the point where he thinks he’s on the verge of hypoventilation, but it just as quickly subsides.

His ribs begin to ache as if something tangible had been wrapped around him.

His lifts up his shirt, half expecting to find red marks or bruising, but his skin is unmarred from whatever it was that he just experienced. He can only hope that he’s similarly unharmed internally.

He is able to eventually complete his breathing exercises and meditation, though it takes longer than he would like for his mind to settle. Of the many strange things that he’s witnessed and taken part in over the years leading up to now very little had felt so deeply personal—so specifically targeted towards him—and nothing that had been personal had occurred without Bruce knowing the name or the face of those attacking him.

Though, despite the strangulating sensation that had made it seem as though something was clamping down around him with the intent to physically wrench him from his current dwelling, it hadn’t precisely felt like an attack.

But he doesn’t have the words to describe what it had felt like, and no one to describe it to. 

A twisted yearning, an insatiable hunger, but more. So much more and so much worse. 

That night as he sleeps he dreams of his island and how much he longs to go back, and he wakes up feeling empty.

The next night he dreams of voices calling out for him—we dreamt of you, we missed you, we crave you, they say to him—and he wakes up hot and shaking.

The voices are familiar; they call up hazy memories of sharp kisses and harsh laughter.

Come home, come home, come home, they demand of him night after night.

But he can’t yet. He’s not ready yet. 

An entire year passes, and although he rarely remembers the complete details of the dreams he knows that they follow a similar pattern. The demands to come home never change, he’s sure of it. Sometimes he wakes up speaking as if he’s responding to whoever it is that he’s dreaming about—that he’s being forced to dream about? That is trying to communicate to him through his dreams?—as if he’s trying to explain why he has to stay away until he’s able to make a difference in Gotham.

The incidents come to a head when he wakes up seething. Usually the dreams disturb and unsettle him—they incite a longing for home and for something _else_, something not-right and unnatural, like multiple rows of too-sharp teeth set into an otherwise human-appearing mouth—because there’s always a possessiveness to them that cannot be ignored. Whatever wants him back in Gotham may not be able to physically drag him back, but it can take advantage of whatever connection he must have with it to demand and wheedle and plead and scream that he return to it. 

He can’t remember the exact words said during what he would later come to realize was the last dream, but he remembers the implications.

He’d seen fire making silhouettes out of the skeletal remains of buildings, he’d heard screams and explosions and terrible laugher, he’d smelled smoke and blood and something sickeningly sweet and foul—like rotting candy apples—in the air. 

If he’s not back in Gotham in five years his city is going to be turned into a madhouse. 

Five years.

His thoughts catch abruptly on that one small thing. Such a strange little detail.

Such a specific amount of time. 

“Five years,” he says under his breath, and there’s a sharp pricking in his head, as if he’s thought of something that he’s not supposed to think of. As if he’s remembering something that he’s not supposed to remember.

The dreams stop.

But thanks to various unconventional and dangerous instances during his teenaged years Bruce has more experience than most others could claim with various methods of mind manipulation and the mental fortitude needed to overcome them. When he tries to think of the significance of the five year cycle his mind slowly—as if reluctantly—brings forth dim recollections of increases in crime, disappearances, and the establishing of city-wide curfews. He thinks of the news articles he’d researched when he was still trying to find his parents’ murderer, and the pattern that he began to perceive as he cast his inquisitive mind to the past. The cycle. 

There’s an intense ache as he forcefully drags those memories forward, almost as if they’d been physically rooted underneath other memories in order to stay forgotten and unearthing them was something that he was not meant to do.

Something that no one was meant to do. 

His gut tells him that there’s far more to the cycle than violence and lawbreaking and runaways. 

A mixture of instinct and paranoia tells him that it has everything to do with flashing green eyes and too-wide smiles, the only features he’s ever been able to associate with the voices in his dreams. 

Even if it will cause him pain to remember, even if as a child he’d been happy to forget whatever it was that has faded into something seemingly benign, even if it takes him five entire years, he’s going to figure out what it is that he’s been forgetting.

He’s going to figure out who—what—it is that’s been trying to lure him back to Gotham.

And when they show their faces he’s going to give them hell for daring to threaten his city.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that this is taking a small eternity, real life is draining me _real hard_ right now.
> 
> Instead of doing one really long last chapter I figured I'd split it up so that I can actually post something before December rolls around. Since the last part will be all stuff that I find fun to write (my boy and his abominations, together again at last) you hopefully won't have another three week wait for an update again, fffffff.

He’s been back in Gotham for several months—long enough that a few sightings have taken place, long enough that a few statements have been made to bewildered police officers that mention a dark figure seeming to fly from rooftop to rooftop—and is finishing up a long night of surveillance of a warehouse on the docks that has a few too many guards who have far too many connections to Oswald Copplepot when Bruce feels something in the air shift.

The hair on the back of his neck stands up and he sinks further into the shadows, but none of the guards have glanced his way. It’s someone else—some_thing_ else—that’s searching for him.

He thinks he can hear laughter, raucous and pleased, echoing in his head. The awful familiarity of the sound—two very different laughs merging into one terrible noise—is almost enough to make him want to go unnoticed.

Glinting eyes and wide smiles, ordinary faces that masked wicked visages that Bruce couldn’t truly recall the look of, names that he hadn’t been able to coax past his lips any further than the first letter before something in his head flickered and shut-down, as if some sort of emergency protocol had been put in place to keep him in the dark.

Keep him compliant. Keep him apathetic. Keep him like every other person in Gotham who forgot about the cycle all-too easily for it to be a natural occurrence. But he’d promised himself that he would solve the mystery of the cycle, and he knows that they are the key to it.

Or the reason behind it.

The wind caresses his face and it feels like cold hands brushing curiously and covetously against his skin. 

“I’m home,” he says under his breath. He thinks about his final dream, about the willful destruction of his city and his people that it had seemed to promise, and his lips thin into a grim line. “I’m going to find you.”

The laughter in his head reaches an inhuman pitch.

He doesn’t hear them speak, but he can feel an awareness land on him as if someone has caught sight of him from far away.

He will find them. 

But they’ve found him first. 

Even with all of his training, and even though he knows that he’s felt this level of scrutiny directed towards him before—how often had he been the focus of their intense and devoted observation for it to feel so awfully familiar?— he still feels his arms break out into goosebumps from the weight of their combined attention.

And just as he can perceive their attention as a tangible existence pressing around him he can also sense their excitement at his homecoming, which skitters over his skin like tens of thousands of tiny insectoid legs.

They missed him. They’re so pleased that he’s returned. They want to see what new tricks he’d learned while he was away. They want to play.

And their reunion has been too many years coming for them to give him too much time to anticipate what they’ll do to ensnare his attention now that he’s back. 

He means to tell the empty air in front of him that they already have his attention, but the eerie pressure in the atmosphere becomes heavier and the very air around him seems to thicken.

If he turns around right now—if he turns around right now—if he turns around—

His eyes catch some kind of movement in the shadows as he spins, the barest glimpse of a fluttering of fabric, and then the feeling of being watched is abruptly gone.

He sleeps uneasily when he returns home. When he does wake up after a handful of hours and makes his way downstairs Alfred’s grim face is enough to make his insides twist even before he turns on the news.

It’s been close to a hundred years since the last large unexplained ‘accident’ which took the lives of dozens of people at once in the midst of the cycle that Bruce has been studiously tracing through history. The disappearances of the past century have added up slowly enough that while the occasional city curfew has been enforced, it would be easy for people living in the moment to just think that this was what life in Gotham was occasionally like.

There is no slow build up this time around to signal the start of the cycle. 

An entire bus of children has gone missing. There aren’t any leads. It’s as if the bus just vanished. The usual driver, the most conspicuous suspect, had been rushed to the ER sometime last night for what appeared to be multiple stab wounds, but one of the parents is sure that when they’d watched their child step into the familiar yellow vehicle that it had looked and sounded like that very same driver.

As if whatever had taken the children was able to transform itself into whatever shape it wanted. As if it was able to conjure an ordinary face to mask its true, horrific features. 

Bruce wonders if they’d seen an unnatural green glow in its eyes. Bruce wonders if they’d been compelled to forget about it as soon as they’d seen it. Bruce wonders how slowly the terror had built up in the missing children as they began to realize that something was wrong.

Or maybe it hadn’t been slowly at all. Maybe it had swept over them all at once, a wave of fear that was almost palpable. 

It was always children that disappeared the most, he’d already known this, but facing the reality of it fills him with rage and sorrow and nausea. 

The police are already hard at work but there seems to be no witnesses to question, as if the few who might have seen that something was amiss were so deeply unconcerned by it that they had forgotten it as easily as one might dismiss the lingering traces of a dream. They were kept apathetic. Kept in the dark. Kept compliant during disappearances and destruction over and over and over again, looping back for at least a few hundred years but perhaps even longer than that.

The cycle needs to be broken. 

Bruce storms down to the soothing shadows of his refuge and pulls up a map of Gotham on his computer, his heart fluttering anxiously in his chest. There has to be a clue. Even if he’d rather ignore it there is some sort of connection between himself and _them_, and there must be a way for him to use that connection, to use the memories that anyone else would have forgotten, to his advantage.

There has to be. 

He stares at the map of the city and forces himself to scrape together the fleeting recollections that he does have of them. Dredging up the blurry memories of when he was seventeen is something that he’s done often enough, but he knows that there must be earlier instances that he’s been wary about digging for. He shuts his eyes, focuses on his breathing, and lets his mind trip into thoughts of them.

His hands curl into tight fists.

He remembers their eerie laughter and too wide smiles, and—

<s>Clowns</s>

His knuckles go white.

Glinting green eyes and voices capable of luring people closer without them even realizing it. He remembers faces underneath faces, as if one was just a projection overtop of the other. He remembers the sensation of being watched. Remembers waking up for weeks after his parents’ murders certain that there was something in the room with him, and he remembers—

<s>Clowns</s>

His nails dig angry red crescents into his palms. A bead of sweat lazily drags down his temple as his heart begins to beat hard and fast, as if trying to bring the memories to the surface is causing actual physical strain. A headache builds up, sharply thrumming in time with his heart. If he gave up on trying to remember the strain on his body would cease, and he’d be free to forget all over again…

But he needs to know.

He curls in on himself, sweat beginning to dampen the hair on the nape of his neck, and fights the urge to bite his lip—

Sharp teeth. Sharp teeth and wet mouths. 

Hungry eyes and drool.

Cold hands. A bundle of red balloons. Eyes that never blinked. Cold hands. A drawing of reinforcements for a tunnel—

<s>Clowns</s>

His mind feels like it’s fraying.

_What are you?_

_The answers to those kinds of questions might just fracture your precious, sharp mind, and we haven’t even gotten to properly play with you yet._

But he digs deeper, down, down, where the memories were left to rot away into nothingness, even as his body screams at him to stop.

He would have been a child when he saw them for the first time. It wasn’t during the same cycle. 

When he was seven years old his parents had broken a promise about going to the circus—

When he saw their faces for the first time he had thought that they were—

Clowns. 

There isn’t enough air left in his lungs for him to scream as something in his head—some sort of mental lock or barrier or unnatural curse—snaps. 

There’s a rush of too many suppressed memories flooding to the surface of his mind for him to be able to sort through them at once. They blur into each other, indistinct for the moment, but he grasps on to the one thing that had seemed to cause the tipping point. 

Clowns. When he was a child he’d thought that they’d looked like clowns.

His eyes open, gaze blurry from unshed tears, and they land on the northern part of the map.

Amusement Mile.

The idea of them being there doesn’t feel like a cliché, even though it likely should, it feels _right_ in a way that Bruce doesn’t think he could explain.

—In the back of his mind he remembers that one of the first large-scale ‘accidents’ that he’d been able to find a written record of, back when Gotham’s population hadn’t even reached five hundred, had taken place on the northern shoreline—

And he has no choice but to trust his instincts on this one, because if he doesn’t act fast he knows that the missing children will never be seen again.

He suits up, mind buzzing as it tries to sort out the memories that he’d managed to tug to the surface, and deep in his chest he feels the stirrings of an emotion that he is absolutely certain isn’t his own.

Excitement.

Connection or not, whether they can sense that he’s planning to head to Amusement Mile or not, they know that they’ve done enough to provoke him into action. 

And they can’t wait to see him again, face to face.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, it's here. I need to go hibernate for a while, fffffff.
> 
> <3

Bruce has never driven so quickly in his life—every beat of his heart is a second that he’ll never get back, a second that he cannot allow to be wasted—and Alfred’s tense voice feeds him directions through his earpiece in an effort to keep him as out of sight as possible in the stark afternoon sun. The commands give him something to focus on that won’t put his mind into overdrive— 

—sharp teeth cold hands flashing eyes wide smiles. They’d scented the air as if they were hunters taking stock of prey—

—and by the time he comes to a sudden stop outside the entrance of Amusement Mile he can’t quite keep the idea of them as hunters out of his mind. Hunters. Stalkers. Predators. What had happened to all of the people who had disappeared over the years? Were they responsible for every instance that Bruce could find a record of, or did they merely represent the latest generation of monstrous clowns with shifting faces? These questions and more buzz in his head as he steers his car into a concealed location, just in case the police aren’t far behind, before stepping out into the daylight. 

The bus is right there, left in an open area as if concealing it would not have been worth the effort—almost like it was meant to act as an invitation—and Bruce is quick to follow the small, shuffling footprints that lead from the bus’s door through the patchy grass to the wooden planks of the boardwalk.

“There aren’t many enclosed places in the park big enough to conceal two dozen children,” Alfred informs him, voice tight but steady. “The Tunnel of Love, The Home of the Future, The House of Mirrors, The Big Top. It has to be one of those.”

The Big Top—

—a clown promising to take him to the circus and get him back home before anyone realized that he was missing. A cold hand curling tightly around his own as if it meant to tug Bruce forward. 

What would have happened to him if Alfred hadn’t called his name when he did all those years ago?

Bruce focuses on the colourful tent in the distance and begins to head in its direction, but the sound of a faint scream snaps his attention away from his sharpening memories.

The door to The House of Mirrors swings open with a creak; yet another invitation that he cannot willfully ignore.

The tinted lights are low when he steps inside, eerie in a manufactured way which does nothing to faze him as he fearlessly begins to make his way forward. The door shuts behind him with a slam after he’s taken half a dozen steps, and he gets the feeling that if he attempted to open it the door wouldn’t budge.

“Alfred?”

There’s no answer.

—years ago he’d heard a scream and he’d run after it, but he’d never found the source. Instead he’d found himself encased in a bubble of silence, as if he was cut off from the rest of the world. He’d been sure that something was there with him, was there watching him—

Bruce keeps going, deeper and deeper into the maze-like structure, twisting and turning and covering far more ground than he would have expected upon looking at the building from outside. When he hears a muffled cry from somewhere nearby he breaks into a run, turning himself sideways to make his way through a narrowing walkway that he barely manages to fit through. 

Then he catches sight of a purple neon sign, an arrow pointing left and a glowing proclamation of ‘The End’, and when he tries to turn back around he almost runs face-first into another mirror.

The maze has changed. 

There’s nowhere for him to go but where the sign is indicating.

He eyes the mirrored surfaces around him, half-expecting to see shadowy figures looming behind him despite the impossibility of it. His own reflections are the only sight that greets him; distorted and menacing. 

He hears another cry, his heart clenches, he darts toward the sign and turns and—

The flooring disappears out from under his feet, or maybe it was never there at all.

The fall lasts a few seconds and he is able to land in a crouch without taking too much damage. With the faded neon light from the sign nearly twenty feet above he can make out the circular pit that he is now at the bottom of as well as the mouth of a large hole, though it is too dark for him to be able to estimate how far it stretches into the earth.

—elegantly drawn schematics showcasing reinforcements for the supports of a tunnel. He’d thought, back then, that they might have been for a subway tunnel—

All is quiet again. 

It’s strange how silent it is considering that he’d been able to hear a scream from outside The House of Mirrors. 

Unless the screaming and the cries which drew him deeper into the maze were just another way to ensure that he made his way to the right spot. Like the bus being in plain sight, the door swinging open seemingly of its own accord, and then cutting him off from the world just as easily as it had beckoned him inside.

The children aren’t here, he deduces. They are somewhere nearby, but they were not taken through the maze. They were merely an effective lure to bring him to this place. To bring him to their doorstep. To bring him to them. 

Something primal and instinctive inside of him screams that if he steps into the tunnel now, when he still knows so very little, he’ll be playing right into their hands. If he steps inside he might not be able to find his way back out. If he steps inside he’ll be trapped down here with them for however long they want. His stomach twists—

—his skin had felt hot where they’d touched him, as if he’d been branded by them. Their attentions had been passionate and _possessive_—

Bruce has no desire to let that happen, and he’s getting sick of being toyed with.

He could get out of the pit easily with his grappling gun, but if he leaves…

Will they shift their focus elsewhere? Or will they attempt to lure him back?

He can’t risk it.

With their comms cut off Alfred will have immediately contacted the police to inform them of the bus’s whereabouts, and if all goes well then the children will be found unharmed while _their_ sinister attention is fixated on Bruce. He tries not to think of the outcome that involves two dozen children going missing and never being seen again.

“It’s cowardly to hide in the dark,” Bruce states, certain that he’s said something similar before, back when he used to wake up in the middle of the night believing that something was in his room with him. “I’m not going any further,” he says to the gapping maw of the tunnel. “If you want to see me—” And they do, _they do_, he can sense it somehow, in the same terrible way that he can sense their attention on him. They want to see him so very badly, they’d just rather he make his way towards them instead of the other way around. They want to draw him in deeper. They want to trap him. They want to keep him. “—then you’ll have to come to me.”

The few seconds of silence which follow his words are weighted with expectation.

The air shifts, he can feel goosebumps raising on his arms, he turns—

And this time there is not just a flutter of fabric in shadows that he sees before any sign of life disappears completely from sight.

No.

The first thing he sees is the gloved hand reaching towards him, the relaxed curl of the fingers indicating that if Bruce hadn’t turned and contact had been made it would have been more like a caress than an attack. His eyes follow the colourfully suited arm up to a pale neck smeared with greasepaint, up to a large red smile, up to gleaming eyes that have been circled in black.

It’s not the same scarring or makeup that he remembers, but the face itself… He knows that face, he’s seen that face, he’s had those lips against his own.

“You’ve gotten even faster than I expected you would. Welcome home, darlin’,” The clown in front of him drawls, grin widening even further, eyes flashing with barely contained laughter. His hand continues to reach forward, as if he means to trace the line of Bruce’s jaw, and Bruce moves out of his reach. 

A stray thought in the back of Bruce’s mind wonders if he means to welcome him back to Gotham, or if he means to welcome him into the tunnel that must serve as an entrance to their hideaway.

By the time he feels breath on his neck it’s too late, he’s completed the step and his back brushes against something solid that was not there before. He is able to twist away before the arms that he sees in his peripheral vision are able to come around him, and he locks eyes with the other.

“We missed you dreadfully, sweetheart,” they purr, eyes fervently drinking in every move that Bruce makes. “We’ll have to make up for lost time.”

The same face, the same eyes, the same clothing, the same greasepaint. They are perfect reflections of each other, the only thing that differs slightly is the voice.

Bruce takes another few steps away, careful not to drift too close to the steep wall of rock at his back. He doesn’t want to end up pinned, but being in the center of the small open space with both of them free to circle around him would likely be even worse.

His eyes dart from one to the other. The sound of their voices and the honeyed way they refer to him: _darlin’_ and _sweetheart_, though perhaps what they really mean and want to call him is _mine_ and _ours_, is starting to unearth another memory.

Their names are on the tip of his tongue. 

His priority is the children, of course it’s the children. His fingers flex and his stance widens in preparation. He mentally goes through every trick and tool he has at his disposal in order to glean the information that he needs out of them. He opens his mouth to make his demands—

“Show me your faces.”

It’s not what he had meant to say.

But perhaps it is what was correct to say; like asking ‘What are you?’ instead of ‘Who are you?’.

“How about you come and take a closer look,” the first one, the one who had almost touched his face, suggests with a smirk. They’re keeping their distance for now, but Bruce knows that they won’t hold themselves back for long.

They’re toying with him. They like toying with him.

But their patience will run out soon. 

“This isn’t what you look like,” he says. The greasepaint is similar, but not right. Not the same as the faces-under-faces that he’d caught glimpses of before. “This isn’t what I remember.”

Their smiles twist wider, their eyes glint, their fingers twitch restlessly at their sides.

“You remember?” The second one tilts their head, eyes scanning Bruce even more intently than previously, as if he’s a puzzle that the other wants to solve. Bruce has been looked at this way before. “What do you remember?”

Red balloons. Schematics. Cold hand. Wet kisses. The scrape of teeth. _Introductions_—

“More than you might expect,” he grits out, the weight of the names that they’d given him suddenly pressing against his tongue. “Jeremiah. Jerome.”

Their restless energy stills for a moment, a shock of surprise and delight and _desire_ washing over them because _remembering_ is a sign that confirms all that they already knew to be true; that their attention through the years has created a one-of-a-kind attachment, and that their boy is something more, something better, than those that they have preyed upon for hundreds of years. 

It doesn’t happen in the span of a blink, it’s just a sudden, abrupt shift. The greasepainted faces are gone and what is left behind are the faces-under-faces. The too wide smiles and sharp teeth. The multitude of raised scars and the patterns that seemed to mimic makeup. Different textures and colours and patterns stretched over the exact same bone structure. Bruce barely has time to take it in before he finds himself having to dodge a tackle from the one who he knows as Jeremiah.

“You feel it don’t you,” he coos as Bruce ducks out of Jerome’s reach. “The connection between us.”

Bruce frowns. Doesn’t answer. Jeremiah shifts and is suddenly at his back—

Bruce turns and kicks. Jeremiah blocks and tries to grab onto his leg, but Bruce manages to slip out of his hands before he can get caught, falling to the floor and sweeping Jeremiah’s legs out from under him then immediately rolling aside. If he stays still for even a second too long he knows they’ll be able to catch him.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Jeremiah slowly pulls himself into a seated position, but Bruce has to take his eyes off of him in order to focus on a more immediate threat. Jerome’s widening grin and bubbling laughter are enough to make his hair stand on end, and the way his glowing eyes lock on Bruce as he inhales deeply, like he’s scenting the air, makes something prick uncomfortably in the back of Bruce’s mind. 

“Tell him you feel it, Brucie,” he says sweetly, “it’s the only way to make him stop talking.”

He darts forward, and Bruce cannot go backwards because at his back is the tunnel and he refuses to be driven inside of it, so he readies himself and is the first to lash out.

Jerome fights with little practical technique, just sheer speed and power that is as unnatural as it is overwhelming. He doesn’t fight like anyone that Bruce has gone up against before, not that Bruce had expected him to. But Bruce has had years of training, has diligently studied as many forms of combat and fighting as he could, and—perhaps most importantly—he believes in the abilities that he has honed over the years and the tools that he has at his disposal, so much so that he is able to block and counter and to even, finally, land a hit.

It’s just a strike to the shoulder, barely enough to make Jerome’s body sway back from the force of it, but Jerome’s eyes flutter shut and he shudders as if Bruce had just whispered something vulgar into his ear. The reaction is enough to make Bruce pause for a fraction of a second too long, and then—

There is a chest at his back, and he is trapped between them in the exact way that he had not wanted to be.

He throws his elbow behind him into the ribs of Jeremiah, whose breath rushes out against Bruce’s neck in a gust as the hit lands.

“Even if you don’t say it, I know that you do,” he rasps, voiced strained. “Oh, precious thing, the things we’re going to _do_ to you, _with you_. We’ll strengthen the link until it’s unbreakable.”

Bruce twists around and manages to punch him in the jaw.

Jeremiah’s head snaps back, upper body arcing away from Bruce before pausing mid-air, unnaturally overbalanced. His eyes flit downward to catch Bruce’s gaze, and his red lips spread wider to showcase his razor teeth.

Bruce lands a kick to his chest before he can say anything else.

“I guess you’ve got more than one way to make him stop talking,” Jerome snickers behind him, and Bruce whirls around and pins him up against the rock, one arm across his throat. “It’s interesting, getting hit. No human has ever managed to hit us before,” Jerome says, only slightly winded from the impact of his body hitting the wall, “_you’re_ interesting. Brucie,” he pauses for a moment, as if in consideration, before purring, “_Batsy_.” He chuckles roughly at the new nickname. “Too fascinating for your own good, that’s what you are. That’s what you’ve always been, that’s why we chose you. Why we want you.” Bruce’s arm settles more firmly against his neck, but Jerome just wheezes out another laugh at the increase in pressure. “That’s why you’re ours.”

Bruce’s lips pull back into a sneer.

“I’m not,” he growls, though the look on Jerome’s face indicates that he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t have time to waste on an argument, though. He’s wasted enough time already. “Where are the children?”

Jerome sighs, rolling his eyes as if Bruce has asked a particularly tedious question. It makes Bruce’s temper flare up, and his free hand clenches into a tight fist at his side. 

“Forget about them. They’re not here, _we are_. You should be focusing on more important matters.”

Bruce smashes his fist against Jerome’s face as hard as he can, hard enough that a normal person would crumple to his feet, unconscious. 

Dark blood lazily trickles down Jerome’s chin from his newly split lip.

Something in the air shifts again.

Bruce distantly wonders if there’s something significant about being the first living being, other than Jeremiah, who was able to make Jerome bleed. 

“You didn’t even need your blunt human nails or teeth to draw blood,” Jerome murmurs under his breath, and Bruce can actually see his pupils expand. A long, pointed tongue slips out from between scarred lips to lap at the blood. Saliva begins to pool at the corners of his mouth. “Turnabout is fair play, Batsy, and I’ve always wanted to know if biting through your flesh would be like biting into something _sweet_.”

Biting through him, hungry eyes, drool glistening on his lower lip, the way he’d gripped at Bruce’s hand as if he meant to pull him in closer. 

Bruce shudders, a terrible idea beginning to take root in his head.

“What do you do to the people who go missing?”

It’s not Jerome who answers, this time, and Bruce has to release his hold on him lest he nearly get caught by Jeremiah again.

“Still so concerned about so many insignificant things,” Jeremiah says, uncaring about the staggering amount of missing people that Bruce is certain that he’s personally had a hand in. “You’d be stronger if you didn’t have such an obvious weak spot, precious.”

“What do you do to them,” he demands again, eyes darting from one to the other. Underneath the smugness and desire that they’re projecting is a gnawing ravenousness, immeasurable in its ferocity.

“Guess.”

Hunters. Stalkers. Predators.

Bruce’s stomach twists.

_Hunters._

And they’re so, so very hungry. 

“You eat them.”

His voice is soft.

He feels sick.

Jerome makes an appreciative noise and Jeremiah hums in agreement, like they’re both pleased that he’s puzzled it out without them having to tell him outright. Like he’s proven himself worthy of their attention in some deranged way.

“Tasty fear and tasty flesh,” Jerome sing-songs, voice thick with hunger. “We have devoured many things since we hatched; seasoning the meat with terror before feasting on it.”

The children—the children—had they already—

Unblinking eyes, a wide smile, scenting the air. The hand gripping onto him as if it meant to tug him towards the sharp teeth that lay inside the drooling mouth. _‘I’ve always wanted to know if biting through your flesh—’_

“You were going to eat me, back when you said that you would take me to the circus.”

_“I think what you really want is to eat me alive,”_ he’d told them ten years ago. _“You both seem ravenous when you look at me.”_

And they were even more ravenous now, the years spent apart only heightening their longing.

“Yes,” Jerome agrees easily, stepping forward. “But aren’t we all so glad that I didn’t? We can devour you in better ways, now. We’ll have so much fun together.”

All those years ago, when they’d kissed him, had the blood of a slaughtered human been transferred into Bruce’s mouth?

“Just looking at you whets my appetite,” Jeremiah says with a pleased sigh. “Though I do want to peel you out of that sweet little suit of yours,” he makes an obscene sound, eyelashes fluttering. “Then we’ll kiss and bite and mark you everywhere. Oh, darling, we’ve tasted fear but we haven’t properly eaten yet, and you are so delectable. We didn’t want to spoil such a wonderful meal with a few trivial snacks that haven’t even marinated in their horror for long enough to be worth the effort of chewing.”

Was it a lie that they hadn’t eaten? Or had they really staved off their hunger because their craving for Bruce was deemed the most important? 

Bruce rushes forward and lashes out, holding his own against two creatures who could kill humans with ease. There’s something about the way that they’re smiling that grates his nerves even further. They’d expected him to fight, at least a little. They’d wanted to be able to gauge for themselves how much stronger he’d become. 

Perhaps he’s stronger than they’d expected—

He throws a Batarang, Jeremiah barely manages to deflect the bladed edge. 

—and he certainly has more tricks up his sleeve than any human they have ever encountered.

“Don’t be that way, Batsy,” Jerome coos, gloved hands at long last latching onto Bruce’s chin then slipping up his face, fingers gripping onto the edge of his mask as if he means to pull it off. He jolts and hisses in pain at the strong electric charge that runs through him at the attempted breach. “All we want is to play with you.”

“And make you laugh,” Jeremiah says agreeably, “and cry, and smile, and beg. Claim you and make you ours in the way we should have cycles ago.”

Bruce punches him in the face.

A rivulet of blood drips down from Jeremiah’s nose and merges into the colour that lines his lips. He wipes the back of his hand against his mouth, looks at the blood smeared across his glove, and then he laughs.

He doesn’t stop laughing, even when Bruce kicks him in the side.

“You’ve learned so many fun new things while you were gone,” Jeremiah tells him.

“It makes us want you more,” Jerome says.

“We want fear and flesh and you, precious thing.”

“_Why?_”

“Eating and indulging is our nature.”

“We have eaten our fill for so long, but we have never indulged the way that we want to indulge in you. We have never hungered the way that we hunger for you.”

“Why,” Bruce demands again. What was it about him that had captured their attention? What accursed trait of his had been enough to spark their interest in him?

“You’re different, Batsy. You’re entertaining.”

A chest at his back, hands on his hips. Hands on his shoulders, a thigh between his legs. He tries to break out of their hold but he can’t, he’s trapped.

He feels warm, too warm. His blood is rushing and his heart is pounding and it’s not entirely for the reasons that they should, although his anger is still burning brightly within him. There’s something else sparking to life, too, and he’s not sure if it’s only because of the residual memories of the last time he’d been trapped between them like this or if there’s something more and worse and sickening to it. 

His breathing turns quick and shallow and Jeremiah leans in, eagerly huffing into the crook of his neck. 

“And you always smell so very sweet and inviting,” he says, and Jerome makes a soft sound of agreement. Bruce freezes, hyper-aware of the razor teeth that lay inside of Jeremiah’s mouth, and exactly what they’re capable of, and how close they are to his throat. “Years ago you’d roam around the city in a mask and bloody your knuckles on those who’d carry those strange little papers that allowed them to commit crime. Sometimes one would land a hit and you’d bleed even more, and all that we desired was to lick every trace of red from your soft skin. I’m sure you taste divine.” He glances up, his irises a thin ring around his pupils. “Do you think you’d like being bitten, sweetheart? I promise I’ll do it softly.” 

Bruce opens his mouth to choke out a response, and at the same time Jerome’s chest expands with an inhale behind him.

“He would,” Jerome whispers lowly before Bruce can deny it, “I can smell it on him.” One of the hands on his hip begins to trail over his hipbone, towards—

“If you don’t stop I’ll break all of your fingers.”

“Do you think that you can?”

“Yes.”

The bluntness of his answer and the ringing truth of his belief in his own abilities makes Jerome pause, though he’s far more charmed than intimidated by the threat. 

“Never mind a few fingers,” Jeremiah says, almost panting as he stares at what little of Bruce’s skin is bared. He leans forward, pressing Bruce tighter to Jerome’s chest and moving his thigh further between Bruce’s legs. “I want—” 

Bruce headbutts him as hard as he can.

Jerome lets out a startled laugh, hold loosening for long enough that Bruce is able to break out of it and get himself out of arm’s reach. He can’t stay here any longer. He can’t stay down here, alone with them, because if they pin him like that again he’s not sure he’ll be able to break free. He keeps his eyes locked on them as he reaches for another Batarang. 

Blood streams down Jeremiah’s face from the gash left at his hairline, when he notices Bruce’s attention is on him he smiles, and his white teeth become stained with red. Jerome studies the bladed weapon in his hand, seeming to measure the pros and cons of moving forward again and becoming a target after Bruce has proven that he’s more than capable of hurting them. After a moment he steps backwards, blowing Bruce a kiss as he draws something out of his coat: a slender mechanism with a switch.

“Don’t worry Batsy,” he says as they both begin to disappear into the shadows of the tunnel. Bruce still cannot make himself step inside of it, and so he watches as they fade into darkness. “You caught us a bit by surprise, my sweet little morsel, but you’ll be the one bleeding the next time we dance, and we’ll make sure that you enjoy every moment of it.”

“Yes,” Jeremiah hisses. “We’re going to memorize the taste of you on our tongue. I’m sure we’ll never get sick of it.”

Bruce can’t see them anymore. Their voices become faint and even more eerie. 

“We won’t leave you alone for too long, darlin’, I promise. But as much as we love the idea of you knowing exactly where to find us, it’s a bit of a security risk giving you the key to one of our doors.”

“Besides,” Jeremiah’s voice adds lightly. “We _always_ know how to find you, so long as you’re in Gotham.”

Their laughter merges into one horrible sound. Bruce feels as though the blood in his veins is turning into ice. 

“Since you’ve been so very good for us, and we like you so very much, I’ll give you a bit of a head start,” Jerome manages to say through his laughter. “Five, four, three.”

Bruce quickly takes out his grappling gun and shoots, careening upwards.

“Two, one.” 

The earth begins to tremble, and a wave of dust and small debris swiftly follows after him as the tunnel begins to collapse. Bruce runs to the purple glow of the ‘The End’ sign, hoping to be far enough from the blast that the ground under him won’t crumble. He hears something click into place behind him and when he glances back a new mirror has fallen into place, the neon sign concealed, the door to their lair hidden.

Smashing through the glass to find the entrance again would be useless now that the tunnel has collapsed, but Bruce has no doubt that there are far more where that came from.

A huge network of tunnels underneath the entirety of Gotham. It would explain how they managed to remain unseen, and how they were able to cover so much ground.

But if there are tunnels everywhere then there really is no way for him to be able to predict where they’ll strike next. 

And he absolutely believes that he cannot hide from them, not in Gotham.

Bruce slowly makes his way out of the mirrored maze; the passage seems easier now, and shorter. Unchanged from the original design. When he makes it outside the sky is dark, as if he’d spent hours underground although it hadn’t felt that long, and when he gazes in the distance he sees flashing red and blue lights encircling the big top.

And then Alfred’s voice finally crackles back to life in his ear.

“—don’t know if you can hear me Master B, but they’ve freed them all. They’re safe now. They’re safe.”

“Alfred,” he croaks, and finds himself at a loss of what else to say.

No one was really safe in Gotham. Maybe they were even less safe now that Jerome and Jeremiah knew that they could use people as pawns to get Bruce’s attention, and every person that Bruce was too slow to save would end up being…

His stomach twists again, and he can’t focus on the sudden rush of relieved words in his ear.

He can’t let that happen, ever. To be hunted and terrorized and brutally eaten alive was the worst fate that Bruce could comprehend.

In the back of his mind, against his better judgment, he thinks that he’d rather they focus their appetite on _him_ and leave everyone else in the city alone.

<s>If they had him, would their hunger for fear and flesh diminish?</s>

Late that night he flips on the news, trying and failing to stay impassive when he learns about the dangerous snare that the children had been put into in The Big Top and how long it had taken the police to safely rescue them one at a time while a bright clock showcased an ominous countdown. 

A few of the older children are able to recount their hazy memories of the man—only one man, because Jerome and Jeremiah had been projecting the same face, the same clothes, the same greasepaint patterns—who had taken them, had threatened them, had laughed madly and eerily all the while like a caricature of a person who belonged in Arkham Asylum. 

The Gotham press, so used to the city’s terrible criminals having memorable epithets such as ‘The Penguin’ or ‘Poison Ivy’ or ‘The Riddler’ are quick to give a name to the beings that are—unbeknownst to them—the biggest threat Gotham has ever, and would ever, face. 

They call them ‘The Joker’.


End file.
